Recommendations of the Editorial team
In recent years, the major US networks have increasingly thinned out their late-night lineups – most recently, CBS canceled the “Late Show”. Now Jay Leno, who once took over the “Tonight Show” from Johnny Carson, has a theory why that is the case and what the format is like today. “Podcasts are really the new talk shows,” he recently told Deadline. “Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson.”
Leno is less concerned with Rogan’s provocateur positions – he even said he wished comedy wasn’t so politically divided – than with the fundamental change in user behavior. For decades, people tuned in to NBC at 11:30 p.m. ET to watch The Tonight Show, which Leno describes in the interview as “appointment television” – a concept he now considers “absurd” because today you can watch whatever you want at any time. This brought him to Rogan, who enjoys freedoms that Leno himself was never able to benefit from.
“Joe talks to everyone about everything,” Leno said. “There’s no FCC to step in and dictate what you can and can’t say, so you really get an unfiltered view of what people are thinking. That’s what I think has changed late-night television.”
YouTube as a new channel
Beyond his statements about Rogan, Leno speculated that YouTube has become the most-watched TV channel in the world. “I talk to young people – they don’t know CBS, NBC or ABC, they don’t know Channel Four; they know Channel 682 or whatever,” he said. “They just go to YouTube. Which is incredible. If you would have predicted ten years ago that YouTube would be the most popular channel in the world, you would have said, ‘What are you talking about?’ But that’s how it is now.”
In this context, Leno, who recently hosted former President Joe Biden on his show, explained that he himself now enjoys the benefits of a YouTube format. He shrugs off the MAGA supporters who say they will boycott him. “It’s free on YouTube,” he said. “I honestly don’t care whether you watch it or not. People are going to come and say Biden is a crook, blah blah, that I only showed his perspective on Trump, not the whole spectrum. Whatever. We’re just driving around. That doesn’t worry me.”
Leno hosted The Tonight Show from 1992 to 2009 and again from 2010 to 2014. Jay Leno’s Garage can now be found on YouTube.